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VS 14: Birds.

This week I’m using a sound taken from Luftrum’s field recording pack. It’s a free package consisting of 1 GB+ high quality recordings and I suggest that you check it out here. You can either download for free via SoundCloud or choose to donate (which goes directly to Save The Children charity) and get the whole package in one go.

Anyhow, the sample is a small snippet of a beautiful nature ambience recording from that pack. I’ve compressed it beforehand to tame the dynamics a bit for the consecutive processes.

To start it off, I’m using CDP’s filterbank 5 which adds some harmonic character to the sound. The possibilities are pretty much endless for these filter processes so spending some time experimenting is the key. There are a lot of interesting parameters here. The Q setting works like a dry/wet control between the original sound and resonating filters. Scatter seems to randomize the tuning of the filters a little which can result in slightly different harmonies. You can also double the fiter depth and leave the original sound completely out. (Which I didn’t need to do here.) Anyhow, here’s the result:

Notice the bird sounds being kept intact while the drone type note is introduced. That’s intentional as I want to use them as an extra glitter layer. Which works all right but I also want to remove the obvious birdly qualities. And for that I go with my CDP workhorse blur.

You can hear the birds got much more subtle now. But at this point you can perhaps hear the sound isn’t really going anywhere, and to get things a bit more exciting one can always slap a couple of external FX on. And here they are. Renoise comb filter and a nice freebie, Glitchmachines Fracture. I didn’t really spend much time tweaking these plugins here but it was enough to add some extra interest:

You could probably call it a day now but let’s go a step further and see, -as once you bounce the effected version down you have a much more interesting sound to play with. So in this case, I’m going with another filterbank and also transposing the output down 8 semitones.

Much more outworldly. You can keep going but no more mangling seems necessary for this tutorial. Again I’m keeping it raw and dry so that you can tweak this to your heart’s content and add spatial effects as needed. But just as a quick demo here’s what I came up with:

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I'm Emre, a 34 year old electronic music producer and sound designer from Turkey. I love playing around with breaks, basses and all kinds of weird samples and this is the place where I share my sonic endeavours. If you'd like to hear more, please subscribe or connect via social media buttons above. See you around!